legacy data

The Monument Valley uranium district is located in northeastern Arizona and in southeastern Utah (Figure 1). It is within the Navajo Indian Reservation where exploration and mining was under the control of the Navajo Tribal Council and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior. A report on the Utah portion of the district was published in 1991 (Chenoweth, 1991). The purpose of this report is to summarize the production in the Arizona portion of the district.

Cove Mesa is a small mesa in the southern Carrizo Mountains, Apache County, Arizona.
The mesa is capped by beds of the Salt Wash Member of the Jurassic Morrison Formation. This
member is the host rock for the uranium-vanadium deposits on the mesa. A small shipment of
vanadium ore was made in early 1944. Later that year, a 959.7 acre lease in the western and
southern Carrizo Mountains was acquired by a civilian contractor for the Manhattan Engineer
District. Included in this lease was a 246.2 acre tract on Cove Mesa. The lease was transferred to
the United States of America; i.e., the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in 1949. Drilling
projects by the AEC discovered a considerable amount of uranium-vanadium ore on Cove Mesa,
which was mined during 1948-1965.

Publication Date

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